Application of sliding-mode control to air-air interception problem

A sliding-mode control (SMC) law is applied to a nonlinear system representing an air-air missile-target interception process. Promising results are obtained for a simple switching surface based on proportional navigation (PN). Partial robustness of the controller is demonstrated, i.e. the control is robust only with respect to uncertainties present in the control dynamics. This is illustrated by a breakdown in the control actuator for which SMC was found to be superior to PN.>